Art

Thanks to my job and this blog I spend a lot of time on the Internet every week. The Weekly 7 is a list of some of the things I’m currently loving, articles I’ve read, awesome things I’ve found on Pinterest, etc, during the week. Sometimes I’ll throw in a photo or two of things I did during the 5 seconds I wasn’t actually on the Internet. Sometimes.

1. One of my tweets made it into a Buzzfeed article! I was hanging out on Twitter on Friday afternoon and saw that people were posting puns of book titles mixed with conspiracy theories and tagging them #conspiracybooks, so naturally I wanted to participate. I threw in 2 puns, one of them being MiddleseX-Files (AMIRITE) and that one got picked to be in the resulting article on the site later that afternoon. FAME.
2. My sister is still updating her blog even though she has been evacuated from Guinea due to the Ebola outbreak. I’m just glad she’s safe!
3. My trip to Colorado Springs is coming up and in the midst of my research about the Garden of the Gods I found out that there is a hot air balloon festival taking place that weekend as well. Guys, I may never come back.
4. Took myself out to the Benefit eyebrow bar on Friday night. Girl-tastic.
5. Finished reading the new Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) mystery novel, The Silkworm. Detective novels are my guilty pleasure (I took a class on them in college).
6. Really want to start investing in some art. Currently obsessed with these beachy (and entirely sold out) paintings by artist Teil Duncan and these beachy (see a theme here?) photographs by Gray Malin.
7. One of my blog posts was featured on The Culture-ist last week! It’s about Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low and the Girl Scouts retweeted it which basically made my life.

Here’s hoping this next week is a good one despite the thunderstorm warnings and the fact that our apartment’s WiFi has been on and off the past three days (currently using up all the WiFi and air conditioning that Starbucks will give me).

One of my new favorite things about traveling is watching people take iPad photos. Literally there are few things more satisfying to me. I realize that this is probably just how it will be in the future — we will have some kind of device that combines phone with computer with camera with GPS with radio and whatever else — and we’ll all just be holding up these little screens taking photos of everything on the street.

This isn’t meant to be a snobby thing — I don’t look down on people who use iPads or phones to take pictures of things (I use my phone half the time, let’s be real here). I know that some people aren’t great with technology and so they only want to know how to work one device for email, Internet, photos, etc and so the iPad is great for that. I also know that not everyone can afford a really nice camera.

I just think the actual visual itself is strange and amusing — someone is standing there in front of a beautiful building or trying to take a great shot of their friends at a restaurant, and so they just hold up this big screen in front of the subject. It just looks so bizarre to me.

When I was in Ireland, people were taking iPad photos everywhere. I recently learned how to create more depth of field in my photos, which I’m pretty excited about, and combined with my natural penchant to be nosy and, fine, sometimes a little creepy, I started taking photos like the one you see above.

I was traveling around with a photography tour group at the time, and everyone in the group was using their nice expensive cameras, meaning they had pretty little patience for these iPad photographers. We obviously encountered this type of thing everywhere we went, as you do when you’re traveling through a popular destination — people are always going to get in your shot. Sometimes, no matter how long you wait, you still won’t be able to get a perfect photo without at least two or three tourists and a few iPads in the frame.

I am still trying to figure out my own personal style as a photographer — trying to distinguish between things I find visually interesting and things that would actually make good photographs — so I experimented a little and just embraced the people using their iPads, trying to get a creative view.

Cathedrals as a whole aren’t really that interesting to me — they remind me of being bored in church as a kid and suffering through one particularly difficult medieval art history class in college — so it was actually kind of nice to have something else to focus on when we were photographing at St. Patrick’s. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had while trying to take pictures inside of a church.

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” -Henri Matisse

I’ve always liked Valentine’s Day, mostly because it means I don’t have to buy chocolate for myself for at least one day of the year. It’s also a holiday that involves flowers, and recently I’ve become kind of obsessed with having bouquets of fresh flowers in my apartment.

I’ve spent a few V-days alone and a few with significant others, and I can’t say I prefer one over the other. One Valentine’s Day I took a day trip to San Francisco with my then-boyfriend, and we wandered around the city, drank expensive beers, and spent the night at a fancy hotel. He gave me roses and I picked them out one by one as we wandered around the city, leaving them in stores or at a restaurant, on the sidewalk and in the car, until I’d left all but a couple of them all over the city.

One year, a boyfriend gave me a book of quotations for Valentine’s Day. Another year I got a book of love poems, and another year I was given a chocolate mold of someone’s actual penis. It was delicious. Last year, I spent Valentine’s Day alone making myself dinner in a t-shirt with cats all over it. I bought myself a little bouquet of tulips and had some wine. This year, I’m spending the weekend with friends, and my little Valentine’s Day gift was a beautiful book of maps from my parents (my eternal valentines).

Wherever you are around the world and whoever you are or aren’t with this weekend, I hope you’re wearing a cat t-shirt and leaving roses all over the city.